Locking your Mac with YubiKey and TokenLock

Sometimes I need to securely "lock" my Mac at work - and one geeky way is the combination of a YubiKey (an awesome tiny USB crypto device) and TokenLock (a *very* useful Mac-OS utility).

These two allow for:

• locking the Mac if the Yubikey is removed
  
• unlocking it, if the Yubikey is inserted again
  

Configure Yubikey

Start the YubiKey personalisation tool and edit the following settings:

Now write that configuration to "configuration slot 2" of your Yubikey.

Configure TokenLock

Second, you need to configure TokenLock to accept the Yubikey only, if it has the correct serial number.

Enter the TokenLock settings dialog:



Great. You're nearly done, one little thing…

Make your Yubikey your primary USB device for TokenLock

Select the USB tab and make sure, your Yubikey is marked "Has serial number".



You're done!

Btw: The guys from Map-Pin software provide GREAT support for TokenLock - which can monitor
bluetooth devices to lock/unlock your Mac… give it a try :-)

two reasons to run for the iPhone-5

my (old) iPhone 4 still works like a charm, battery life is ok, no scratches, reliable.

So - what reasons did I come up with to convince my wife (aka Ministress of Finance) that I really need the new model? None, obviously.

So I ordered it without any particular reason, signed up for somewhat cheaper monthly plan (save approx 5 Euro/month) and got the fancy gizmo on Friday, premier-day here in Germany.

After using it for two days now, I found two reasons for *really* loving it:

1.) the new form factor, its slender and lighter design feels perfect for me!

2.) the panorama camera - (available in options menu when taking a picture), automagically stitches together images to terrific results - without the slightest manual step required.

See this 180 degrees example, taken in our (small!) garden:


imho this is great - deformed perspective, but what do you expect from 180 degree images?

THIS has high addiction potential!

The Ultimate Authentication Device - but currently without market

That's what I was looking for the last years: A tiny, sleek, affordable, secure and really cool device for authentication: Forget about this plethora of different passwords and login-names. Just press the green-glowing button of the Yubikey - an imho revolutionary device invented and produced by Swedish company Yubico: It plugs into any USB port and behaves like a regular USB-keyboard. With the exception that it has only one single (mystically illuminated) key - and emitts a highly secure one-time-password every time this key is pressed.

Good to know: Their sdk (development kit) is open source, their business model is selling the hardware (starting from 35 US$ for a single USB-key, going down to approx 10 US$ for larger quantities).

I could really solve all login and authentication problems - would there be enough acceptance around the great players. Steve Gibson had a great coverage in his security-now podcast - but my favorite sites still don't use neither OpenID nor YubiKey...

But hey - wait: Most revolutions took a few month to really take off...

Update on Security-Key

The cool security key (on which I blogged a while ago) finally arrived -
and here's a short screenshot (thx to PayPal) how it is used to login
to your paypal account:






Now my login is based upon TWO assets, one I KNOW (my passphrase) and one I HAVE (the security key)...

Good News for Security-aware Internet-Shoppers...

Maybe I'm the last one to notice - but PayPal offers a smart password-generating
device called "Security Key". It's one of those cute one-time password generators - and (currently) works for both EBay and PayPal accounts.

Why don't the banks offer those devices for free??

I'm actually using PayPal only for a few transactions per year - but that's likely to increase - as their device (which costs only 5Euro / 5 USDollars) drastically increases security...

Anybody out there already owns one? They are currently (in 2007) sold in US, Germany and Australia, with many more countries to be included soon...

Virtualization on the Mac

Yesterday I installed the new version of Parallels Desktop (3.0). It feels a bit smoother, but still cannot handle two monitors... (my usual setup at home).

What every Windows user will surely like: The excellent snapshot manager, which allows even branches :-)

Too bad I don't have any graphics-intensive games to test the DirectX improvements...

3D on your Desktop

watch this demo - looks cool. Was linked by Bumptop (found via
Peter Hruschka).